AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D review: the new fastest gaming CPU

Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6 and Crysis 3 Remastered.

Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on Feb. 27, 2023

As we mentioned earlier, we've tested with both DDR5-5200 and DDR5-6000 RAM for our Ryzen 7000 and Intel 12th/13th-gen systems. For DDR4-based systems, including Intel 11th-gen and AMD Ryzen 5000, we're using DDR4-3600. The 6000MT/s results are labelled as such; if a result is unlabelled then it is DDR5-5200 for the DDR5 systems and DDR4-3600 for DDR4. We'll examine the impact of different DDR5 speeds in more detail on page five of this review.

Anyway - in these tests, we'll examine how the Ryzen 5 7950X3D behaves in Cyberpunk 2077, as well as two recent releases from series that have featured prominently in our previous CPU benchmarks: Far Cry 6, renowned for its single-core reliance, and Crysis 3 Remastered, a DF staple. We've opted for highly repeatable scenes here from a variety of sources here - an in-game cutscene, a brief open gameplay segment along a fixed route and an in-game benchmark.

Remember that you can mouse over the results in the tables below (as long as you're using a desktop browser rather than a phone) to get dynamically generated performance readouts for all processors we've tested. Meanwhile, clicking the graph swaps you into percentages, making it a bit easier to judge relative performance at a glance.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is our second RT benchmark, showing how RT performance can add even more load to the CPU and cause CPU bottlenecking in some scenarios. This benchmark, taken from a motorcycle run along the busy city streets, also demonstrates the game's reliance on high-speed memory, with big performance advantages evident with DDR5-6000 over DDR5-5200. Interestingly, we see a much smaller gap between our 5200MT/s and 6000MT/s runs with the 7950X3D, with only a two percent margin here. The top result exhibits a solid six percent performance advantage over the 7950X, with a more impressive 17 percent improvement to the lowest one percent frame-rates.

Cyberpunk 2077: DX12, RT

Far Cry 6

The single-core reliance from Far Cries past returns in the sixth instalment of the franchise. The 7950X3D again impresses, delivering a solid five percent gain over the 7950X and a six percent lead over the 13900K.

Far Cry 6: Ultra, TAA

Crysis 3 Remastered

Crysis 3 Remastered allows us to revisit our favourite scene from early on in the original game's campaign, which oscillates between character closeups and complex distant geometry to load both CPU and GPU. Once again, we're starting to edge towards GPU limitations here even with DLSS performance engaged, with a 322fps average that is just a couple of percentage points beyond the 7950X and 13900K.

Crysis 3 Remastered: Very High, DLSS Perf

Now let's move onto our extra credit game testing, as we see how the 7950X3D is affected by faster RAM on page five - and disabling some of its cores to see how it works as a quasi Ryzen 7 7800X3D, ahead of that chip's real launch, on page six.